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Born into a middle-class family in Buffalo, New York, Johnson was a champion swimmer in her youth and aspired to be a lawyer.[1] She was a criminal justice major at Northeastern University when she tried modeling[6] while on summer break in 1971.[1] She quickly landed an assignment with Glamour and began working steadily.[6] She went on to appear on more than 500 magazine covers, including the August 1974 issue of Vogue, becoming the magazine's first African-American cover model.[1] Her appearance on the cover changed the beauty ideal in US fashion, and by 1975, every major American fashion designer had begun using African-American models.[7]

In late 2014, she wrote an article for Vanity Fair[12] in which she accused Bill Cosby of drugging her in a meeting at his Manhattan residence in the 1980s, although the incident did not result in a sexual assault. Johnson said that Cosby spiked a cup of cappuccino with an unknown drug. As she felt her "body go completely limp," she realized what was happening. Johnson said she then screamed and cursed at him several times before Cosby got angry and dragged her outside and hailed a cab for her. Johnson decided to tell her story in hopes that "by going public" she would "encourage anyone [who] has been sexually victimized to speak out."[13][14] Her memoir, The Face That Changed It All, which discusses the Cosby incident, was released on August 25, 2015.

Subsequently, Cosby started a defamation law suit against Johnson, alleging that she was lying about the drugging incident and contending that Johnson's story, first told in the Vanity Fair article, had been repeated in numerous interviews. It seeks unspecified damages and an injunction preventing the model from repeating her claims and requests they be removed from Johnson's memoir.[15] A friend of Johnson said, “She expected this to happen. She didn’t seem upset 'with the news', but I think she’s prepared to counter-sue.”[16] Cosby dropped the lawsuit on February 19, 2016 to devote more time to his criminal case.[17]